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Samuel Pearce Krantz Grommes.
Born 7-24-05 at 8:06am.
9lbs 7oz.
22 1/2 inches long.
Gah. You know, I realize terrorism is scary but for pete’s sake, let’s not all lose our minds. NY cops are now going to start searching random people’s bags on the subway. All in the name of “stopping terrorists.” This post by Bruce Schneier is, as usual, a good and sober commentary on the issue. He and the commentors below the post make some excellent points.
Beyond all the other problems with this scheme, none of which are small, people are missing one important fact about terror bombings. The point of a bombing on a subway is not to blow up the subway, it’s to kill people. If I have a bag with a bomb in it and a cop stops me right at the entrance to the subway, why wouldn’t I just blow the bomb right there? There will be lots of people around because a cop randomly searching people will cause a backup and a crowd just by being there. Plus I get the benefit of closing down the entrance to the subway for an unknown period while they repair any damage. And if I get through, which is the far more likely senario, I still get to blow up the bomb wherever I want.
Once again this is a pointless measure that puts us one more step down the road toward a police state.
Wow, I’ve known about The Wayback Machine for a long time but never thought it would have my old website in it. Well, it does. Here’s a view of my old personal site (not a blog, an actual old-school personal website) from New Mexico Tech, circa 1998. This isn’t the first site I had up or even the first version of that particular site but it’s the first one they have. Not all of the images are there so some of the (at the time) fancy stuff doesn’t work but it’s mostly intact. Awesome.
More bombings in London today. These ones didn’t seem to be very successful, though, thankfully. After 9/11 I always said that if the terrorists were really smart about terror, they wouldn’t have crashed all the planes in one day. They would have one (maybe two to hit both World Trade Center towers) and then waited, then struck again, and again. The best way to cause real terror and affect a society is extended, small campaigns. Look at Israel. They have bombings there almost weekly it seems. Hitting somebody once doesn’t cause terror. It might cause anger or fear, but terror is a different beast.
A more benign example is movies. The Exorcist is a movie of terror. It’s slow, crawling, shadowing horror. Something like Texas Chainsaw Massacre is not a terror movie. It’s a scare movie. The 9/11 attacks were horrible, but they didn’t cause long-lasting terror in people, except maybe in NY. Bombings in random places killing dozens week after week would cause terror because it’s unknown. You wouldn’t know where to go to be safe. The damage to the economy if people started staying home en masse would be terrible, for sure. Of course the next step would be bombing random homes so that even that ultimate sanctuary isn’t safe. But who knows if these people are thinking long-term. Who knows if these aren’t just copycats?
This is a great article by Hal Crowther about the irony-free and morals-free Bush administration. One of the best, most hard-hitting, articles I’ve seen recently. It touches on the administration, John Bolton, the press, and the relentless attack on the poor and middle class. Great, great, stuff and not one of the typical shrill attack pieces that pretend to be authoritative but just end up sounding whiny. Crother has his act together.
Thanks to Doc Searls for the link.
Good article on the value of books in school and life. One quote that mentions something I see talked about quite a bit but always gives me the willies:
Many entering students come from nearly book-free homes. Many have not read a single book all the way through; they are instead trained to surf and skim.
I just cannot fathom never having read a book and not having them around. I remember watching the first time Oprah Winfrey did her book club. There were women on the show who hadn’t read a book in decades. The very idea freaks me out. My 3 year old daughter has more books on her shelf than some adult homes I’ve been in. Don’t people think it’s weird when somebody mentions a new book or they see somebody reading and they have to think “Hmm, I should do that sometime”?
Even if you only read one book a year, at least do that. Read in the bathroom, on your lunch break, before bed, whenever you have the chance. Even if it’s 10 minutes 3 times a week and you think you’ll never finish because you read slowly, who cares. Nobody is grading you. If you don’t know what to read, ask somebody in a bookstore. Tell them you like X and Y movies. They’ll have a suggestion. Ask a librarian. Heck, ask somebody else in the library. Choose something random off the ‘New Books’ shelf at the library. I used to do that every time I went and I found some of my favorite books that way (Red Earth and Pouring Rain being my all-time favorite random find and one of my all-time favorite books period).
Just read.
Tim O’Reilly points to an article on The Big Picture blog about something I talked about a week or so ago, the declining state of movie theaters. He focusses on the increasing number of advertisements at the beginning of movies nowadays. I don’t know if they’re talking about regular TV ads or movie trailers, I’ve never seen a regular TV style ad (besides the ones for Fandango at the Century theaters) in the movies. I like the trailers, personally, but I sure would be pissed if I had to sit through ads for Ford or whatever after paying for my ticket. I fast forward commercials on TV for a reason, they suck. The first time I have to watch a regular commercial before a movie will be the last time.
If you want to see the future of media, check this out. I don’t know who this is (yet) but I’m sure it wasn’t made by a corporation or an old-school news media entity. This is the power of cheap, powerful tools. With a digital camcorder, a web server, and in this case some Flash these people put out a very powerful, very real video commentary. Welcome to the 21st century.
That link is Doc Searls’s note (although the link text above is my wording, not his) about how Dell shut down its Customer Support Forum because people were using it to bitch about Dell’s apparently horrible customer service of late. The point of his post is that while they have shut down their forum, the move is sort of a fingers-in-the-ears-yelling-blah-blah-blah move because people have many other forums in which to complain about Dell. Instead of dealing with the issues or at least trying to contain the blast radius of people’s complaints, they’ve drawn attention to it and spread the fire all over the internet.Eventually people will learn but until then, it’s very frustrating to deal with these clueless companies. I always build my own computers because I know the only idiot that’s going to piss me off in that case is me.
My only dealing with Dell support was when a server went up in smoke here at work (literally) and they told us our Gold service contract only got us a 2-week turnaround on a new server. After speaking to multiple people about it, being told nothing could be done, and us getting us good and pissed off, a new server arrived in 3 days.
The press finally gets some balls and presses the President’s press secretary on something.
“You’re in a bad spot here, Scott” – Salon.com
Finally. It’s nice to see these idiots doing their jobs and not taking any crap from the White House for once. Of course the issue is being pushed by them as “You told us all lies and now our feelings are hurt so you’re going to pay” rather than, “You lied to the American people and should be out on your asses.” Oh well, I’ll take what I can get. I’ve said for awhile that the way these people were going to be taken down was toppled by their own arrogance and hubris. And with Bush’s approval numbers hovering just slightly above mine, I’d say the time has come.
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